


Your Blood, Your Bones, Your Voice, and Your Ghost

by AnotherShotofBourbon



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Angst, F/F, blood and angst and vengeance, reformed supervillain Asami, superhero Avatar Korra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-03
Updated: 2015-09-03
Packaged: 2018-04-18 21:02:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4720319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnotherShotofBourbon/pseuds/AnotherShotofBourbon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years ago Asami Sato was the greatest Super Villain Republic City had ever seen. Then the Avatar returned, a great hero that could have been the end of the Equalist. But at the same time Asami met Korra and fell for her. So the supervillain quietly stepped away from that life. And now she's waiting for Korra to come back; the Red Lotus has been giving the Avatar lots of trouble and the former super villain doesn't know how much longer she can sit back and let her love fight them alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Blood, Your Bones, Your Voice, and Your Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> Be warned there is violence and death of bad guys and it is very angsty so that's coming.

Asami looked out over the expansive lights of Republic City at night. Once it was all hers, in every way. Her company was the largest, most powerful in the city, in the nation, and her Equalists had almost taken the city over completely.

But she left that life behind years ago. That wasn't her anymore. She had something else to hold on to every night, someone else.

She'd met Korra six whole months before the Avatar returned. They dated while Asami was living a double life. For almost a full year Asami was the supervillain in charge of the Equalists.

No one knew she was behind it all, and that was the way she preferred it. Let Amon, let her father take the fall. Let them taste defeat. She could rebuild, she could retake the city. Or she could be with the girl she fell in love with. Asami felt she had to make a choice: be the Equalist, or be with Korra.

The girl and the Avatar had made Asami question all of her previously held beliefs. The light in Korra, the love, her convictions, her voice, her everything, made Asami believe otherwise.

If she believed in anything, it was because Korra believed in it.

It was another late night for Asami.

She wasn't an idiot. She knew she was in love with the Avatar. The coincidences were too much, too often. Bruises mysteriously appearing after brawls including the Avatar, late nights that involved the superhero bringing evil to justice.

The irony didn't escape Asami for a second. The first real supervillain the city had seen in decades had fallen for the reincarnation (or so the papers would have you believe) of the city's greatest hero.

Korra, well the Avatar, had been having a rough time lately. A new threat, anarchists calling themselves the Red Lotus had been winning the fight against the Avatar for several weeks now.

Asami was worried because she knew Korra could handle it, but she didn't know for how much longer she could stand by and watch the woman she loved go into battle alone.

The women hadn't shared all of their secrets yet. On Asami's part it was because she feared what Korra would do or say if she found out. And she suspected Korra felt the same or was trying to protect her.

But it didn't matter. Korra was out there right now. Probably fighting against the Red Lotus that very instant and Asami was stuck in her apartment, watching the city from safety and distance, unable to help.

She continued to stare, to hope, to wish she could help for several hours before there was an urgent knock at her door.

Strange, no one asked to be buzzed into the building.

Asami went to the door and opened it only to find a blood stained hand print on the door and Korra slumped on the ground, bleeding heavily and looking worse than Asami had ever seen her.

"There's something I need to tell you Asami," Korra coughed. She sounded even worse than she looked.

Her costume, once all blue and black had been stained and ripped and destroyed.

"Korra!" Asami as she pulled Korra up and into her apartment. She carried the severely injured woman to her couch and laid her down.

Her worst fears had taken physical form.

"Asami, listen... Please," Korra croaked.

"No," Asami snapped as she started pushing clean cloths on Korra's wounds in an effort to stop the bleeding. "I'm going to save you and then you can tell me whatever you need to later. Ok? You save your strength."

"I'm... Avatar," she moaned quietly. "Love... You... Equalist.... Or not..."

Asami couldn't spend anymore time listening to what could be her girlfriends dying words.

She just grabbed her cell phone and punched in a number she'd memorized years ago.

"Varrick," said a sleepy, bored voice.

"It's Sato!" Asami yelled. "I need you at my apartment to save someone's life right the hell now!"

"Your apartment not..."

"Yes my fucking apartment! She dying Varrick! I need you here right now!"

"This is gonna cost-"

"Do I sound like I give a fuck? Get here now! She dies you die, you get me Varrick? You save her life you can name your goddamn price, you prick!"

"I'll be right there."

"'Sami..." Korra groaned. "Please..."

Asami tried to quiet her girlfriend, the person she loves more than herself. "Shh... Please just stay alive. I've got someone coming who will save you. Just please don't leave me!"

Korra tried to nod, but her eyes rolled back into her head. Asami quickly checked her breathing and pulse. A bloodied finger checking a bloodied, tan neck.

Both were weak, too weak for the girl who used to be so strong.

Asami was desperately trying to stop the bleeding for what felt like hours but was only minutes. Eventually here was a buzz as someone was demanding to be let in.

Asami leapt up from Korra smashed the button to open the door with more force than was necessary and ran back to Korra and put pressure back on her wounds.

A minute later Varrick burst in and pushed Asami aside as his assistant Zhu-li assisted him in checking over Korra.

"This is bad Sato."

"I fucking know," Asami said, she was too exhausted to argue.

"I'll do what I can but she needs real healing, a real doctor. Or even someone with healing powers."

"I know, and I'll take her there as soon as it's safe."

She knew he'd seen the uniform, he knew who Korra was now.

"Just keep her alive for the next like eight hours. Just until morning," Asami told him.

Varrick and Zhu-li worked for several minutes before he yelled, "Sato! We need to move her to the table. Quickly help Zhu-li move her! Come on!"

Asami picked up Korra who felt lighter than she should have. Too light for someone who was basically all muscle.

Once Korra was on the table Asami was shooed out of the way.

She had Korra's blood on her hands, and... was that a piece of bone?

Asami ran to the bathroom and threw up what little she had left in her stomach.

Then she washed off her hands, made them as clean as possible.

She didn't feel a thing, no sadness, or guilt, the only thing Asami felt was cold, engulfing fury. Like a blizzard covering her soul.

In her bedroom and she went to the little work room she had. There she found her Equalist shock glove, her tools, and a couple of extra gadgets she'd been tinkering on.

She took everything back towards the kitchen while she worked listening to the sounds of frantic, life saving surgery done by a crazy back alley doctor using only what tools he could find.

Asami put her hands to use, doing what she was born to do, fix and machine objects, kept her mind off of the bloody horror in front of her. She adjusted the gloves' power settings to go both higher and lower. She did this as she watched in quiet dread as Korra's heart stopped. Zhu-li finally got it going again which allowed Asami to breathe once again. She then started a quick spot weld of putting a variety of nails on the fingers of her glove. They were rusty and they were dirty but they were sharp.

The Red Lotus would be lucky to get something as trite as tetanus from her. She was going to destroy them completely, take everything from them, and then she would kill them. Asami was the greatest supervillain Republic City had ever seen and she was going to remind them of exactly who she was.

She'd finished with the glove and Korra's surgery was still going.

The Avatar was still unconscious and barely alive, Varrick was working frantically to repair the insane amounts of damage Korra sustained, and Asami was making some modifications to a grappling hook she once made. Well she was making adjustments to the ammunition. It was too wind resistant, she needed to be able to cut through gale force winds.

Asami had finished her work almost an hour before Varrick told Zhu-li to "do the thing" meaning close Korra up.

"How bad?" she asked.

"Kid... You know who she is right? She's the Avatar. She's not exactly our best friend. She destroyed your empire."

"No, I gave up my empire for her. How bad is it?"

Varrick's already thin lips thinned even further.

"She's alive. Her brain is still working. Her heart is beating. And she's breathing. But without help, real actual hospital help, she won't make it."

"I need you and Zhu-li to stay with her, keep her alive until sunrise. If I'm not back by then take her to Tenzin, his sister is a world class healer."

"Sato, you don't understand how bad she's hurt. She doesn't need one healer, she needs at least six. She needs a small army of surgeons. I can keep her alive for a few hours but not without serious consequences. Like if she lives she might not walk again serious."

"I'm going to make sure the people that did this can't do it again," Asami said without raising her voice, but a force behind it that made Varrick take a step back. "They're probably still looking for her. So if we take her now she'll die. If we take her later she'll live. Get me?"

"Yeah," Varrick muttered.

Asami left the room and returned with a large duffle bag on one hand and her old Equalist mask in the other.

"Here," she threw the bag at Varrick. "It's four hundred thousand dollars in bearer bonds. Accepted at any financial institution in any nation. Utterly untraceable, totally legal. Your payment so far. You do what I ask and I'll give you another million when I return."

"Sure thing."

Asami turned, grabbed her weapons of war and left her apartment.

In the elevator she pulled out her phone and called her black market contact.

"Shady Shin," she said. "The Equalist is back. I need all of your explosives you've got."

"You got the cash?"

"You know I do. But I'm afraid what you heard was bring me a lot of explosives, when what I said was, bring me all the explosives you have," Asami said with the same force in her voice that she used to make Varrick do what she wanted.

"Uh, yeah, no problem."

"Do not disappoint me Shin. I am not to be disappointed tonight."

It was almost four am by the time Asami got her explosives and everything she needed in place. It was also surprisingly difficult to find the Red Lotus' hide out.

When she finally forced her way in to see Zaheer she was pleased to see she was being greeted by all four major Red Lotus members.

"She demanded to be let in!" a grunt tried to explain but Zaheer waved him off.

"What does The Equalist have to say to the Red Lotus?" he asked, no nonsense.

Asami started clapping, an awkward hollow sound of leather on leather amplified by the large, empty space.

"What one super villain can't come to congratulate another one on a victory well fought?" Asami asked, glad her mask was concealing her utter contempt.

Zaheer's eyes narrowed.

"What? You finally defeated the Avatar. You did what none of us has ever been able to. Congratulations!"

"So you came to offer your congratulations to the people who did what you could not? Because you were defeated by the Avatar? You were weak and you couldn't fight and you will not last in our new world."

"You're wrong. I wasn't defeated, Zaheer. I never got locked up or killed or put in the hospital. I chose to stop. Because I found someone who made me better than I was. She made me want to be better. And I was. God, Zaheer do you remember that feeling? Finding someone you love so much, who loves you so much they make you your real, true self?" Asami asked. She could almost see Korra there, a ghost of her begging her not to do what she has planned.

"I don't need to remember. P'Li and I have finally been reunited."

"And you know my pain when someone rips that goodness away from you," Asami continued as she slowly advanced, walking towards P'Li. "When that love is replaced with a broken, bruised body and the sunshine flees from her eyes and you know that love is never coming back. It's fucking terrible isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Such a shame," Asami said as her static glove was turned on to the maximum setting and shoved right in P'Li's face, most the charge going right through her third eye.

"Say goodbye Zaheer," Asami said once P'Li stopped convulsing and then a moment later Asami snapped her neck. "Do you remember how good it felt to have her love Zaheer? Did you commit it to memory? Because that’s all you’ll have left."

There was a stunned silence for a second.

"No!" screamed Zaheer as he put out a hand to blow Asami away, but at the same time she drew her grappling hook pistol and fired.

A gust of air hit Asami, knocking her back, but the bolt she fired was unaffected. Her engineering work had paid off

The bolt split in two, one piece striking Zaheer in the hand, the six inch piece of steel sinking into flesh and bone and anchoring itself there as the other bolt embedded itself into the concrete wall behind him, holding him there by a length of high tensile steel wire.

The earthbender Ghazan threw a massive piece of rock at Asami, who ripped off her helmet and easily dodged the giant piece of concrete.

Before he could act again, Asami had gotten in close. With her non-shock gloved hand she reached out and twisted his arm till it snapped, with her other hand, she sank the nail covered tips of her fingers into his throat, grabbed the vulnerable piece of flesh and pulled, tearing out his throat and veins.

Asami dropped the dead, bloodied mess of a Red Lotus member just as Zaheer tried to pull all the air out of her lungs. She once again fired her modifying grappling gun again and this time hit Zaheer right in the forearm. One bolt forcing its way in between the bones and the other tethering him to the floor.

The second she got her breath back the waterbender attacked, locking one of her arms in water. But Asami just rolled her eyes as she brought up her shock glove and sent a pulse of electricity across it, stunning the woman long enough for Asami to escape and close the distance between her and her target. This time she just turned her glove to maximum and touched the woman, sinking her nails into her flesh and holding on long enough for the electricity to fry the woman's heart and brain.

Zaheer however managed to get another blast of wind to hit Asami, this time generated out of his foot. She was knocked to the floor, but when she got up she fired another bolt at Zaheer and got him in the thigh.

The Red Lotus leader was now suspended off the ground by three limbs all punctured by steel bolts.

"You know as the Avatar lay in my arms dying as I tried to do anything to save her," Asami said as she put her face level with Zaheer's, "the only thing I could think of was that she was the only thing that was keeping me on the right side of things. You took that away from me. So now I'm taking everything from you."

Asami reached into her jacket and pulled out a detonator.

"All of your people outside?" She clicked the button and an explosion tore through the grounds outside the screams of the Red Lotus sentries filled the quiet early morning air. "All of your other bases?" She clicked the button again and several coordinated buildings exploded across the city. "Those sleeper agents of yours I was able to find?" She clicked button again. "Everything you have?" One last press and explosions tore through everything the Red Lotus owned.

For the first time Zaheer snarled. Korra’s ghost was behind Zaheer, a phantom, a piece of Asami that was desperately trying to get her to not do what she was going to do.

The image of Korra’s spirit, the thought of her already being dead and wanting nothing more than to have Asami go down this path was enough to spur her on. She wouldn’t let Zaheer or anyone else ever touch Korra again.

"I know what you're thinking," Asami told him. "God this hurts. This pain is more than I could have ever imagined. Your lover is dead. You organization is dead. Your friends, dead. Your dreams, dead. The Avatar, still alive."

Zaheer snarled again, "I will kill the Avatar. I will take away everything that means anything to you."

"Zaheer," Asami said condescendingly. "Stop copying my work. I'm twice the villain you will ever be. Because unlike you, when I kill someone I make sure they're dead. And remember when I said this is the worst pain ever? I actually lied. See I didn't think I was going to be this good with my grapple gun. So I got some extra bolts."

Asami fired three more rounds into Zaheer's limbs. She pierced his other leg, made sure to put one through his unaffected hand, and the last one through his foot. She cast a glance at the disapproving ghost of her dying girlfriend. Her fury only grew.

"And you know what I did? I coated these in aspirin. You're probably wondering why I would do something like that. I'll tell you. Because in addition to dulling the excruciating pain you must be in, it also stops the blood from clotting. So the painkillers will wear off and all of a sudden you'll be in insane amounts of pain. Bleeding out with the only thing to look at being your dead lover's body."

Asami made a point by dragging P'Li's empty eyed corpse over to where Zaheer had to look at it.

"So I'm going to let you die with this thought," Asami said, "you failed in every conceivable way and you won't ever get the chance to touch her again."

Asami's rage was consuming her and she didn't want to wait for Zaheer to slowly bleed out, and she could see from his face that the pain numbing effects were already lessening, so she took her glove and stabbed all of the nails right into his heart and twisted.

A few minutes of writhing and convulsing on the wires Asami had impaled him on and Zaheer was dead.

It was barely sunrise as Asami left the building behind, the flames already spreading across it.

She arrived back at her apartment just in time to help carry Korra to the nearest hospital, that already knew they were coming. The doctors and nurses and healers were already to go, prepped and ready to save the life of the most gifted hero any of them had ever seen.

Korra was in surgery for the better part of a day. Varrick got his money and was out of the country, not willing to stay put when the leader of terrorist guild was revenge killed by the lover of the person he just saved. It was too messy and someone would probably be looking for him.

Asami never left Korra's side. Through the surgeries or in the days afterwards as Korra lay unconscious in a hospital bed, with the specter of doubt hanging over them. She might never wake up. There was too much damage.

"Come on Korra... Give me something. I need your eyes, I need the light and sunshine in them, give me your voice, your anything," Asami broke down finally and let all the emotions she'd refused to feel for so long out. She was crying, holding on to her unconscious lover's hand for dear life. "I promise I'll take all the hits for you, I'll take all your tears, all your pain. I'll take you to a place faraway from here, where nobody knows you, and nobody gives a damn. Just please. Give me anything. I can't do this without you."

 

**Author's Note:**

> The idea came to me from two different directions: 1.) the song I'll Believe in Anything by Wolf Parade (which is almost the opposite tone of this story!) and 2.) the idea that if Asami was a villain the only person that'd be able to stop her would be Korra. And if you take Korra away from her Asami will be the most terrifying person you've ever seen.  
> And yes I did decide to end it there because I'm mean >:D  
> So tell me what you think. Does Korra wake up? Does Asami tell her what she did? Would Korra forgive that? Do they go to a place far away from here? Are you upset that Wolf Parade is on an indefinite hiatus? Give me your headcanons!


End file.
